Henry Huang

REGENERATION: ARE CELL LINEAGES RESTRICTED OR DO CELLS TRANSDIFFERENTIATE IN THE REGENERATEING ZEBRAFISH FIN? Henry Huang¹, Stephen L. Johnson². Department of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO¹; Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO²

Zebrafish Danio Rerio provides a powerful genetic tool for studying vertebrate regeneration as Zebrafish fins faithfully and precisely regenerate the excited tissue upon amputation. Thus, it is to our interest to explore the mechanisms that regenerates new cells in the regenerate, that is: whether lineages are restricted or not. To address this question, Two methods are employed to make clones of labeled cells in the embryo in order to identify and observe how these labeled clones interact in the regenerated fin: generation of chimeras by blastula stage transplantation; secondly, the generation of mosaics by transposition of genetic lineage markers. We are studying regeneration of the fin using clones generated by each method to determine the degree of lineage restriction for each cell type in the regenerating fin.